IBM SPSS Statistics vs. MATLAB

IBM SPSS Statistics is well suited for pretty much any data analytic scenario. It can handle extremely complex and large-scale datasets with ease. It especially shines if you have to do any kind of analyses that involve significance testing. Being able to do any number of significance tests (i.e., t-tests, chi-square, ANOVAs, etc.) right inside the tool is very valuable. The only scenario I would say it is less appropriate is if you need to work on a very small dataset and answer very simple questions, like frequencies or averages. In those cases, something like Excel could probably do the job just as easily.

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MATLAB really does best for solving computational problems in math and engineering. Especially when you have to use a lot of functions in your solving process, or if you have a nonlinear equation that must be iteratively solved. [MATLAB] can also perform things like integration and derivation on your equations that you put into it.

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• SPSS has been around for quite a while and has amassed a large suite of functionality. One of its longest-running features is the ability to automate SPSS via scripting, AKA "syntax." There is a very large community of practice on the internet who can help newbies to quickly scale up their automation abilities with SPSS. And SPSS allows users to save syntax scripting directly from GUI wizards and configuration windows, which can be a real life-saver if one is not an experienced coder.
• Many statistics package users are doing scientific research with an eye to publish reproducible results. SPSS allows you to save datasets and syntax scripting in a common format, facilitating attempts by peer reviewers and other researchers to quickly and easily attempt to reproduce your results. It's very portable!
• SPSS has both legacy and modern visualization suites baked into the base software, giving users an easily mountable learning curve when it comes to outputting charts and graphs. It's very easy to start with a canned look and feel of an exported chart, and then you can tweak a saved copy to change just about everything, from colors, legends, and axis scaling, to orientation, labels, and grid lines. And when you've got a chart or graph set up the way you like, you can export it as an image file, or create a template syntax to apply to new visualizations going forward.
• SPSS makes it easy for even beginner-level users to create statistical coding fields to support multidimensional analysis, ensuring that you never need to destructively modify your dataset.
• In closing, SPSS's long and successful tenure ensures that just about any question a new user may have about it can be answered with a modicum of Google-fu. There are even several fully-fledged tutorial websites out there for newbie perusal.

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• It has a very user friendly library which helps users learn this software fairly quickly in a short span of time.
• The graphical user interface provided by the software is really good.
• The code that a person writes allows options for debugging.
• One can visualize the flow of control of their code inside MATLAB.

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• Cost is becoming prohibitive.
• Availability of procedures in the base package seems to be dwindling.
• The copy-and-paste function from output to Excel is not as easy as it once was (now I have to do a "paste special").
• Text and date handling are terrible.
• Need to include AI-based NLP for survey verbatims and other text-based fields. This is becoming increasingly important in the CX world, yet SPSS seems to be ignoring it.

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• MatLab is pricier than most of its competitors and because of this reason, many organizations are moving towards cheaper alternatives - mostly Python.
• MatLab is inefficient when it comes to performing a large number of iterations. It gets laggy and often crashes. Python is better in this regard.
• There is a limited number of hardware options (mostly NI) that can be connected directly to the data acquisition toolbox.

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Both
money and time are essential for success in terms of return on investment for any kind of research based project work. Using a Likert-scale questionnaire is very easy for data entry and analysis
using IBM SPSS. With the help of IBM SPSS, I found very fast and reliable data
entry and data analysis for my research. Output from SPSS is very easy to
interpret for data analysis and findings

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Probably because I have been using it for so long that I have used all of the modules, or at least almost all of the modules, and the way SPSS works is second nature to me, like fish to swimming.

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MATLAB is pretty easy to use. You can extend its capabilities using the programming interface. Very flexible capabilities when it comes to graphical presentation of your data (so many different kinds of options for your plotting needs). Anytime you are working with large data sets, or with matrices, MATLAB is likely to be very helpful.

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SPSS can tend to crash when I am trying to do a lot of data. This can slow me down when I need to do a lot of data

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SPSS does the job, but it can be slow. I do have to plan a lot of time to get through a huge amount of data.

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I have not contacted IBM SPSS for support myself. However, our IT staff has for trying to get SPSS Text Analytics Module to work. The issue was never resolved, but I'm not sure if it was on the IT's end or on SPSS's end

The built-in search engine is not as performing as I wish it would be. However, the YouTube channel has a vast library of informative video that can help understanding the software. Also, many other software have a nice bridge into MATLAB, which makes it very versatile. Overall, the support for MATLAB is good.

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Have a plan for managing the yearly upgrade cycle. Most users work in the desktop version, so there needs to be a mechanism for either pushing out new versions of the software or a key manager to deal with updated licensing keys. If you have a lot of users this needs to be planned for in advance.

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If you have made it this far, you should have a very good idea of how SPSS stacks up the competition (data processing and analytics tools). Even the free ones, such as r Studio or Stata, are leaps and bounds ahead of SPSS. IBM is resting on a reputation developed nearly 30 years ago and has shown no desire to improve.

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How MATLAB compares to its competition or similar open access tools like R (programming language) or SciLab is that it's simply more powerful and capable. It embraces a wider spectrum of possibilities for far more fields than any other environment. R, for example, is intended primarily for the area of statistical computing. SciLab, on the other hand, is a similar open access tool that falls very short in its computing capabilities. It's much slower when running larger scripts and isn't documented or supported nearly as well as MATLAB.

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I am neutral because I have not had to look into scalability since I am using as a student.

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• I found SPSS easier to use than SAS as it's more intuitive to me.
• The learning curve to use SPSS is less compared to SAS.
• I used SAS, to a much lesser extent than SPSS. However, it seems that SAS may be more suitable for users who understand programming. With SPSS, users can perform many statistical tests without the need to know programming.

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• MATLAB helps us quickly sort through large sets of data because we keep the same script each time we run an analyzation, making it very efficient to run this whole process.
• The software makes it super easy for us to create plots that we can then show to investors or clients to display our data.
• We are also looking to create an app for our product, and we will not be able to do that on MATLAB, therefore creating a limiting issue and a new learning curve for a programming language.

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